Ellie runs a small-group tour operation out of Cairns. Australian, second generation in the business, reef and rainforest day trips, twelve staff. She came to us because her Chinese bookings had flatlined at roughly 4% of her volume while her total business was up. Her competitors down the street were visibly full of Chinese couples in their late twenties. Hers were not.
Her problem was not price and it was not product. It was that she was still selling the way she sold in 2016, through two Chinese wholesalers who used to fill her boats with 40-seat coach groups. Those wholesalers now send her maybe six groups a year. The Chinese travellers arriving in Cairns are still arriving. They just book differently, and they never hear about her.
I am Olivier Verot, founder of GMA. I have lived in Shanghai since 2012 and I have spent the last decade building Chinese acquisition channels for tourism boards, hotels and tour operators, including several in Australia. I have watched the Australian inbound market go from coach groups to solo travellers who plan everything on their phone, and I have had to rebuild client funnels twice because of it. Find me on LinkedIn.
What Actually Changed Between Ellie’s Two Best Years
The volume came back. Not all of it. In the twelve months to April 2026, Australia received about 1.1 million Chinese visitors, up 20% year on year, which makes China one of the country’s fastest growing source markets again. It is still short of the 2019 peak. Anyone telling you the market is fully recovered is selling you something.
The money matters more than the headcount. According to the Australian Embassy in Beijing, Chinese visitors spent A$9.2 billion in Australia in the twelve months to March 2025, roughly a quarter of all short-term international visitor spending, off a much smaller share of arrivals. That is the number to put in front of your board. Chinese travellers are not your biggest group by volume. They are your most valuable one per head.
Three structural shifts sit underneath that recovery.
- Group travel lost its monopoly. The Approved Destination Status coach group used to be the default way a Chinese family saw Australia. It is now a minority product, mostly bought by travellers over 55 and by first-time visitors. Everyone else travels FIT: two to four people, self-booked flights, self-booked hotel, activities bought two to five days before they do them, often from a phone while already in Australia.
- Air capacity is the real ceiling. Seats between Chinese cities and Australian ones have been rebuilt route by route since 2024 and are still not back to 2019 levels. Capacity, not demand, is what caps your season. Check which Chinese cities have direct lift into your nearest airport before you spend a dollar on marketing. If there is no direct flight from a city, that city is not your market this year.
- Visas got easier in both directions. Australia and China have agreed to grant each other’s nationals five-year multiple-entry visas for tourism and business. On the Chinese side, Australian passport holders travel visa-free for stays up to 30 days under a policy currently extended to 31 December 2026. A five-year multiple-entry visa changes buying behaviour: repeat visits become plausible, and the second trip goes further from Sydney than the first.
Tourism Australia read the same signals. It signed a memorandum of understanding with Ctrip in July 2025, and Ctrip alone accounts for more than 40% of the Chinese travel market. Its 2026 creative campaign dropped the postcard approach and sold emotional payoff instead, the idea that the trip changes something once you are home. That is not brand fluff. It is a direct response to a traveller who has already seen the Opera House ten thousand times on her feed.
Australian Tourism in China: What Chinese Travellers Say They Want
Tourism Australia’s Consumer Demand Project remains the most useful piece of research on this market, and the underlying preferences have proven stable. Asked what they look for when choosing a destination, Chinese respondents put natural beauty and environment first at 57%, food, wine and local produce second at 46%, and safety, security and accessibility third at 45%.
Australia scores in the global top three on natural beauty, alongside Hawaii and France. It is the food and wine axis that has moved most since the original research, and it has moved in Australia’s favour. More on that further down.
The age skew is what most operators get wrong. The largest segment was 25 to 34 year olds. That was true when the study came out and it is truer now that FIT dominates. This traveller does not read brochures, does not call a travel agent, and does not speak to your front desk before arriving. She reads other travellers.
Strategies for Increasing Lead Generation
So how do you attract these travellers to your services? The answer is still digital, and the underlying mechanism has not changed: the vast majority of travellers decide and book online, so you need an online reputation inside China’s platforms. What has changed is which platforms, and in what order.
1) Presence on Baidu
You need quality Chinese content that is actually seen. Baidu is still the largest general search engine in China and Google is not available, so domestic platforms decide who exists. Baidu is where the verification happens: someone hears about your tour on social, then searches your name to check you are real.
SEM produces leads but they are often lower quality. Chinese users, like users everywhere, skew toward organic results over the paid block at the top. Baidu SEO is slower and pays back better, because a page that ranks keeps working after you stop paying. It has to be written in Chinese characters, because that is how the searches are typed, and it has to sit on a site Baidu can actually crawl and load quickly from inside China.
If you cannot be found on Baidu when someone types the characters for “Australian tour operator”, you are invisible at the exact moment a warm lead is trying to confirm you are legitimate.
A Chinese-language site is needed for search and for basic communication. English is still not widely read at a comfortable level by leisure travellers, so the content has to be adapted into Chinese rather than machine-translated and forgotten.
2) Xiaohongshu Is Where The Trip Actually Starts
This is the part of the funnel that did not exist when this article was first written, and it is now the top of it. On Xiaohongshu, 230 million monthly active users have declared travel interests, they generate more than 2.4 billion travel-related searches, and over 80% of them consult guides on the platform before going anywhere, according to 环球旅讯 (TravelDaily). There are more than 390,000 professional tourism accounts and roughly 21 million new notes posted per month.
The mechanism is worth understanding, because it is not advertising. A traveller types “凯恩斯 潜水” or “塔斯马尼亚 自驾” into the Xiaohongshu search bar and gets back first-person notes: photos, receipts, timings, complaints, the shuttle that never came. She reads eight or ten of them. If your business appears by name in several of those notes, with a price and a photo of what she gets, you are in her plan. If you appear in none, you do not exist, no matter how good your Baidu ranking is.
Which is why the work is content seeding, not media buying. You need a steady flow of notes from real travellers and small KOC accounts, written in the platform’s voice, tagged with the search terms people actually use. It compounds. A note published in March still brings bookings in November. We covered the mechanics of this in more depth in our guide to Xiaohongshu as a search engine.
3) B2C and B2B in China: Be the Expert
For Australian tourism businesses, the split we typically see is around 70% B2C, individual travellers, and 30% B2B, Chinese travel companies looking to feature hotels, packages, tours and experiences. Both still matter. A Chinese partner remains useful for communication, negotiation and closing on the B2B side, where contracts get signed on WeChat and rarely by email.
Tailor the message to which side you are addressing. Research the right groups and industry channels if you want relationships with Chinese travel businesses that can list and resell your product. Establish yourself as the expert by publishing useful content, answering questions and staying in the conversation, and anchor that expertise on what Chinese travellers actually come for: nature first, food and wine second.
Chinese buyers look for businesses they perceive as established and respectable. A twelve-person operator can absolutely create that impression, provided the Chinese-language presence looks maintained rather than abandoned in 2019.
4) WeChat: Stop Broadcasting, Start Keeping
WeChat is still the backbone of Chinese digital life, and Weibo remains useful for short-form reach and QR code distribution. But the reason to be on WeChat in 2026 is not the official account feed, which almost nobody reads organically anymore. It is private domain traffic.
Here is how it works in practice for a tour operator. A traveller scans your QR code on Xiaohongshu or on a printed card at check-in. She lands in a WeChat group run by a staff member with a real name and face. That group answers questions in Chinese within minutes, posts the weather for tomorrow’s departure, and handles the rebooking when a trip is cancelled. Cost of reaching that traveller again: zero. Compare that with paying to re-acquire her on Ctrip.
The second WeChat change is search. WeChat’s search now runs on an integrated AI layer, and Chinese users increasingly ask assistants like DeepSeek and Doubao for travel recommendations in plain language rather than typing keywords. Those models answer from indexed Chinese-language content. If nothing about your business exists in Chinese, you are absent from the answer. We wrote about what WeChat integrating DeepSeek means for brands, and it applies directly to tourism.
5) E-Reputation
E-reputation is built on social platforms, forums and review sections, and Chinese travellers check all three before paying. They want to see what other people said, and they are strongly swayed by it. This is the area where you cultivate positive sentiment and contain the damage from a bad review, mostly by responding in Chinese, quickly, and in public.
One practical rule from the field: a negative note on Xiaohongshu that gets a detailed, non-defensive reply from the business often ends up converting better than a clean profile with no reviews at all. Silence reads as absence.
6) Accept Alipay and WeChat Pay, Then Say So Loudly
This one is small, cheap and consistently ignored. Chinese travellers have not carried cash in a decade and many do not hold an international credit card. Both Alipay and WeChat Pay are accepted in Australia through acquirers such as Adyen, Stripe and Citcon, which handle the currency conversion on the back end. Setup is a payments conversation, not an IT project.
The commercial value is not in the transaction fee. It is that “支付宝/微信支付” on your Chinese-language page and on the door removes a real anxiety before booking, and it gets mentioned in the notes travellers write afterwards. It is one of the few things you can implement in a week that measurably lifts conversion.
7) The Spend Moved From Shopping to Experience
The old version of this article ended on baby formula, and that was accurate at the time. A quarter of visitors once cited buying quality infant formula as a factor in choosing Australia. That era is over. Cross-border e-commerce killed it. A Chinese consumer now orders Australian formula, vitamins and skincare from her phone in Chengdu and has it delivered in four days, so she no longer flies 9,000 kilometres to fill a suitcase.
The wallet did not shrink. It moved. It goes to restaurants, wineries, diving, wildlife encounters, Indigenous-led tours, road trips, anything that produces a story and a photo set worth posting. Food and wine were already the second-ranked reason Chinese travellers pick Australia, and they now capture budget that used to go to retail. Which is good news for operators and bad news for duty-free.
Practical consequence: stop selling your product as transport and access. Sell the specific moment. “Half-day reef trip” converts badly. “Sunrise on the outer reef, 12 people maximum, Chinese-speaking guide, breakfast on board” converts.
What Worked for Ellie
Ellie’s first instinct was to go back to the wholesalers and cut her rates. She offered them 18% off. It moved nothing, because their group volume itself had collapsed, and discounting a channel that has no traffic just makes you poorer.
Her second attempt was a Chinese landing page and a small Baidu SEM budget. It generated traffic and almost no bookings. The reason was diagnosable: people arriving on that page had never heard of her, and a paid ad from an unknown foreign operator asking for a deposit is not a trustworthy object in China.
What worked was rebuilding in the right order. Xiaohongshu first, with a seeding programme of small accounts and real customer notes tagged around Cairns, the reef, and diving certification, in the language people search with. Baidu second, so the name check landed on something credible. Then a WeChat group for anyone who had ever booked, run by a Mandarin-speaking guide already on the payroll. Then Alipay at the counter and on the booking page.
Fourteen months in, Chinese bookings went from about 4% to 11% of her volume, and those bookings carry a higher average basket because FIT travellers buy the small-group option and add the underwater photo package that coach groups never bought. She did not add a single wholesaler. The channel that fixed it is one she controls.
What To Do Monday Morning
- Pull your flight map. List the Chinese cities with direct or one-stop lift into your nearest airport. That is your target list. Ignore the rest of China this year.
- Search yourself on Xiaohongshu in Chinese. Type the two or three terms a traveller would use for your product and your city. Count how many of the first twenty notes mention you. If it is zero, you have found your problem and you did not need an agency to find it.
- Fix the Chinese name. Pick one Chinese name for your business, register it, and use it everywhere. Three different transliterations across three platforms means no accumulated search equity.
- Call your payment provider and ask what it takes to accept Alipay and WeChat Pay. Usually days, not months.
- Find your Mandarin speaker. Someone already on staff or one part-time hire. Chinese-language response time is the single biggest conversion variable we see, and it is not an agency job.
- Write down what the trip changes. Not the itinerary, the feeling and the photo. That is the brief for every note, every caption and every landing page you will produce.
If you want the destination-side view of the same market, our sister site covers the 2026 action plan for Australian businesses targeting Chinese tourists, with the visa and booking-platform detail. The mechanics also translate to other long-haul destinations: see how operators approach the same funnel for Chinese tourists visiting the USA and for high-spending Chinese travellers in the Maldives.
FAQ
We are a small operator. Do we really need Baidu, Xiaohongshu and WeChat all at once?
No, and trying to do all three badly is the most common way to waste a first-year budget. Start with Xiaohongshu, because that is where the trip is decided and where a small operator can win on specificity rather than spend. Add Baidu once you have something worth verifying, typically after three to four months. WeChat comes last, when you have customers to keep. The order matters more than the number of channels.
How long before we see actual bookings?
Expect three to six months before the first traceable bookings and around twelve before the channel carries real weight. Content seeding compounds slowly then holds. Anyone promising bookings in six weeks is selling paid traffic, which converts poorly for unknown foreign brands. Budget for a year and judge on trend, not on month three.
Should we still work with Chinese wholesalers and OTAs?
Yes, but stop treating them as the strategy. Ctrip holds more than 40% of the Chinese travel market and being listed there is worth doing, especially for hotels and ticketed attractions. The catch is that OTA traffic is rented and the commission never stops. Use it for baseline volume, build your own Chinese-language search presence and WeChat base for margin, and you will not be exposed the next time one channel dries up.
About Our Marketing Agency
GMA is a Shanghai-based lead generation agency and we have worked on the Chinese tourism market since 2012, with tour operators, hotels, wineries and regional tourism bodies. We build the Chinese-language search presence, the Xiaohongshu seeding and the WeChat retention layer that turn Chinese travellers into direct bookings instead of OTA commission. If you run a tourism business in Australia and Chinese arrivals are not showing up in your numbers, contact us and we will tell you honestly whether the channel is worth your budget.
